This guy they’ve got running around the Treasury Department. This so-called “pay czar.” This guy who is threatening to pinch the pay of those delusional, too-big-to-fail executives. He reminds me of Larry David, the hyper-neurotic producer of “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

At 64, Kenneth Feinberg is about the same age as the crusty comedian. He has the same pushy, New York City whine. He’s also bespectacled, wears the same male-pattern-baldness haircut, and puts on a very entertaining show about nothing.

“Pay czar is a very unfortunate term,” Feinberg lamented. “My grandmother from Lithuania is totally confused.”

I met Feinberg briefly last week when he spoke at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers’ annual conference in Phoenix. There, he offered this David-esque scene from his life:

“I said to my son the other day: How do you like this guy? We’ve driven him from $5 million down to $1 million.”

“My son looks at me and says: ‘What an idiot. You’ve lost it. Why are you paying this guy $1 million?'” “We’ve got to keep him,” Feinberg told his son. “If he leaves, the company may be threatened.”

“Dad, I’d rather lose the $80 million that they owe taxpayers rather than give that guy the $1 million.”

Feinberg’s son doesn’t seem to understand that in the too-big-to-fail world, there is little, if any, difference between a manager and a mis-manager.

Dad pays them all, even if it seems like that Seinfeld episode where Cosmo Kramer won a legal settlement of free coffee for life, despite being the manic klutz who spilled the scalding hot cup on himself in the first place.

“A pay czar sounds like somebody who imposes edicts on his subjects,” Feinberg said. “And that is not what I’m doing.”

Feinberg’s job has been to negotiate the pay of executives at seven companies that received “extraordinary assistance” from the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program.

More than 400 companies received TARP funds, but Feinberg has only had his hands on the biggest ones: American International Group Inc., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., General Motors, GMAC, Chrysler and Chrysler Financial.

Citigroup and Bank of America have repaid their TARP funds, so they no longer have to put up with Feinberg’s antics. The remaining five, though, still deserve Feinberg. And this week, he’s expected to announce 2010 pay packages for their top 25 executives.

Feinberg said he’s been trying to slash salaries to $500,000 or less with no guaranteed bonuses. But he often negotiates this by offering executives stock that could be worth millions in just two to five years.

Feinberg sees this as incentive-based compensation, although critics note that these bumbling executives may only be getting staked for the next serendipitous ride up from the bottom, compliments of the U.S. taxpayer.

Can you imagine standing in front of a group of journalists, who toil like fools for a middle-class wage, trying to explain how $500,000 a year, plus a potential multimillion-dollar stock windfall in two to five years, really isn’t a lot of loot? Especially for guys who bankrupted their companies and nearly took down the U.S. economy with them?

“The gap in perception between Wall Street and Main Street is a chasm,” Feinberg said. “It’s like Pluto and Earth.”

Feinberg, himself, lives closer to Pluto. He is paid nothing for the pay czar gig, but this is good marketing for his Washington, D.C., law firm, where he reportedly made $5.76 million in 2008, and where over the years, he’s made fortunes from lawsuits over asbestos, Agent Orange and defective contraceptive devices.

Feinberg’s other pro-bono work has included running the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, doling out nearly $7 billion in federal funds to more than 5,000 victims and their families. He once got an email: “Dear Mr. Feinberg: My son died in Oklahoma City. Where’s my check?”

As pay czar, Feinberg said, it’s not easy negotiating with people who believe they are somehow irreplaceable.

“I hear that all the time: Irreplaceable,” Feinberg said. “Everybody is irreplaceable. The graveyards are filled with irreplaceable people.”

“If the company loses them, where do you think they are going to go? China! Everybody is going to work in China?”

“I didn’t know when I took on the job that it’s not just about money and what people think they need to send their kids to private school, buy a Lexus or buy a second summer vacation home. In our society, money is sort of a surrogate of self worth, and it gets very, very emotional, you see.”

“I’m not arguing with somebody who ought to make $2 or $3 or $4 or $1 million, just because, ‘Well, I need that money in order to survive,'” he said.

“People say ‘I am worth this much relative to my next-door neighbor, and if you deduct compensation from me, you are denigrating my worth.’ It even gets a little existential,” Feinberg said. “It’s sort of ‘my place in society’ and it becomes very complicated because of that.”

A czar is someone a president appoints when there’s deep public concern about an issue, but nothing much to be done about it. Case in point: the drug czar. And what’s the best drug of all? Fast money on Wall Street.

The pay czar seemed like such a nice guy, worrying about all those emotional and existential issues. So I asked him: Did you ever consider that maybe these executives that you are supposed to be czar-ing around are simply suffering from narcissistic personality disorder?

The pay czar just gave me a Larry David smirk and shrugged: “You gotta be a shrink!”

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